. . . a strange fatality pervades
the whole career of these events,
as if verily mapped out before
the world itself was charted.

Moby Dick

I was standing by the master (the slave, another computer over by the
coffee, could take orders but not change its mind, switch the catch of
the day, say, from dolphin to snapper; I was bussing tables at a Key West
raw bar, at land's end), looking out across the Gulf in a dining room packed
to the gills, when a table of fifteen male spring-breakers took a pitch
and broke into a profuckingfessional rendition of "Vive L'Amour."
They were the Baker's Dozen on tour, Harvard's version of Yale's Whiffenpoofs,
barred from doing poor little lambs gone astray but other songs were fine
and after the first they gathered around the shucker station and did quite
a few, but before we knew there was an ordinary explanation, as Vive L'Amour
got underway, I turned to Ashby, waitress of long standing, and said, "Just
when you think it's a horror flick, it turns out to be a musical."
She knew what I meant.

Life's cinematic when events wouldn't do in a film, are too implausible
by half, when things happen that anyone could write but no one would believe,
or when scenes (like in the Cuban restaurant) have central casting written
all over them (where waiter, bartender, manager and cook all look the part
so acutely as to unnerve). I'd been seeing Ashby safely home, past
Peter the exboyfriend stalking her and one night as we drove away from
the raw bar in her white '57 bmw (he could spot it a block away, combing
the streets on his bicycle, and the place is so small and circumscribed
that this was stalker heaven; he'd show up uncannily, moments after she
did; in the car we'd spot him on corners and suddenly head the other way),
he came at us on the bike for all the world like he was playing chicken.
She didn't swerve, just gunned it and he swerved and we heard a thump as
he kicked a fender in spite and then she had to swerve to avoid a car coming
toward us on the narrow street and we flew out to the other end of the
island where, utterly freaked, she called her exhusband, who'd been driving
the car we nearly hit and had passed Peter seconds later. It was
a small town at lightspeed, on infinite improbability drive.

A night or two later she dropped me off and drove to a friend's house
where Peter, waiting outside, raped her, broke her shoulder, convinced
her he'd kill her and split. Another friend found her and took her
home, where she called me and asked if I'd go to the waitress meeting (there
were no waiters, never had been so I bussed, took the edifying position
of working behind, beside and before a staff of waitresses, reconfirming
my conviction that I'm most at home in their company and my take on this
odd dawning; on a cooler door in a hotel kitchen where I helped cater a
wedding reception once, I found taped a clipping disclosing that the groups
tipping least are, from the "top," doctors, lawyers and bankers; if the
hierarchy of respect so ingrained in the culture, so central, so assiduously
preserved and promoted, is inversely correlated to kindness, to decency,
if positions accorded the highest esteem this side the Atlantic are more
than likely filled by pompous overpaid assholes whose deepseated anxiety
over undeserved success and illgotten gain expresses itself in the habitual
undervaluation of services rendered, then waitresses as a group are systematically
disabused, disillusioned to the penny and better for it, in the gap between
a good tip and an insult; another way to put the notion up front, the defect
in civility, crack in the golden bowl, is "what every waitress knows";
is it perfume from a dress? no, not at all) the next morning and tell them.
It was late by then so I stayed up and it'd take a while to sketch the
factors bearing on that situation. I knew these women.

I'd given Ashby a key when she first felt endangered and when, as she
let herself in one day, arm in a sling, she called out for a familiar favor,
on my way to her I put a cd in and punched up Eno's "I'll Come Running
to Tie Your Shoe." She caught it before the line came and grinned
and you won't know if the song hasn't touched you what that moment entailed
but you can well imagine. Just when you think it's a horror flick.

It can be Disney with a twist: a raw bar regular had a birthday
one night with helium balloons, one of which he gave to a little kid from
up north and soon after the family was seated it broke free and floated
to the ceiling, out of reach for everyone to see. The kid kept looking
up at it and the sense of loss spread, dampening spirits and putting me
in mind of the time fifteen years earlier when I took my daughter to the
children's zoo in Central Park and a keeper gave her a balloon for not
being like the other kids. On the way home, at the corner of the
park by the horsecab stand and the Plaza, that one took off and I could
still see it--so I gauged the height of the string and asked to use an end
of one of the benches, crouched on it, jumped and just missed. Someone
said, "He's gonna get it," and by the time I was positioned on the bench
again all eyes were turned, trained. I leaped, stretched, grabbed
it, landed and handed it back, to thunderous applause and from the kid
a look that said Han Solo had nothing on me. As the family left much
later the father apologized for keeping the table so long, "but anyone
who could do that . . . " and he trailed off.

Several years earlier I'd visited, read in the airline monthly on the
way that "if Key West isn't the end of the world, we have the best view."
Like the restaurant at the end of the universe, poised on the brink, rocking
back and forth across the penultimate moment, apocalypse nightly.
Paradise was flickering when I landed, accustomed after a week of them
to "randomly rotating blackouts." A turbine down on the mainland
left too few watts to light the island all at once, so, perishables being
what they are, twohour outages roamed unannounced. Routine penultimacy.